Bill O'Connor

Bill O’Connor holds a dual job at the SF Vault, an innovation and startup accelerator in San Francisco/Silicon Valley...

He is the Dean of the Vault Innovation Academy (VIA), focused on designing and directing innovation research, developing innovation analysis/insights, and developing innovation techniques.

He is also the Director of Vault Innovation Services (VIS), focused on working with large global companies; Silicon Valley tech giants, unicorns, and startups; and governments around the world, helping them to go beyond mere "innovation poetry" and to actually do real innovation.

Bill is also the Founder/Director of the Autodesk Innovation Genome Project, a 10-year research project and an evolving innovation methodology. Over the past seven years Bill has delivered 500 innovation-related presentations and workshops to 200 companies/organizations from 40 countries around the world, including Facebook, Tesla, AirBNB, Google, Twitter, Starbucks, Nike, IKEA, Bechtel, Boeing, the US Naval Academy, the US DoD, and the World Bank.

Currently Bill is leading the Nobel Laureate Innovation Project, a partnership with the Nobel Committee in Stockholm, where Bill and a team of researchers conduct face-to-face interviews with Nobel Laureates to better understand how they innovate.

Previously Bill was the Innovation Strategist at Autodesk in San Francisco, working with Autodesk's largest customers to help them to actually innovate (versus just talking about innovating). At the company he also served for seven years as the Editor of the Autodesk thought leadership journal Autodesk POV, and for ten years (overlapping) as the primary speechwriter for Autodesk's CEO.

He has 25 years of experience managing projects at the intersection of strategy, innovation, technology, and design, living and working in New York, London, Boston, and San Francisco. Today Bill lives just over the Golden Gate Bridge with his wife and their dog Zinzino, a leading global canine innovator.